“‘Art thou ill, my brother? Look upon the hand of the holy Saint Gregory, which the Lord hath sent unto thee.’”
“‘Death, flee away from this poor creature, in the blessed name of Saint Gregory and of the Lord of Hosts!’”
It was from that day, she knew, that the love of words came to suffuse her life with its radiance, tuning her ears to cadences of sound, charming her eyes with the ecstasy of light and color, delighting her imagination by opening gates into far fields. Had the lips of countless thousands in their age-long life endowed them with music? Had the visions, evoked by them centuries ago, lingered within their syllables?
From that day as the penitent pilgrim in the still, white wood she became a worshipper at their shrine, repeating to herself again and again the sentences and phrases which Mary Christmas had first endeared to her and which had stayed to take up their own places in her heart:—
“‘The Lord be merciful unto thee.’”
“‘In the blessed name of Saint Gregory and of the Lord of Hosts.’”
Single words, too, began to hold a charm for her, words quite free from their context, but never alone because of the pictures they called forth. Silent, holy, high, garden, old—what magic lay within each one of them!
Old was, perhaps, her first love and kept its place in spite of many contending rivals. Mary Christmas loved old. Upon her lips it opened the gates of ancient cities, led one over desolate, hoary plains and hot, sand-swept deserts, carried one to remote gardens within gray, crumbling walls, brought before one’s eyes a time-worn, weary land. Cynthia came to cherish those three letters as one cherishes a rare jewel which in changing lights gives forth changing colors. In fact, she grew so ardent in her love for them that she felt personally aggrieved when John at the breakfast table, his father being absent, cried in a sudden declaration of independence:—
“I hate this nasty old porridge! I won’t eat it!”